Predators' paradise: Coalinga mental hospital

The state’s worst sex offenders are kept at Coalinga, where Gardner could have lived

The remote Coalinga facility, which opened in August 2005 at a cost of $388 million, still has about 600 unused beds. The cost of confinement there is $185,000 a year per person — almost four times as expensive as prison.
— John Gibbins / UNION-TRIBUNE

The remote Coalinga facility, which opened in August 2005 at a cost of $388 million, still has about 600 unused beds. The cost of confinement there is $185,000 a year per person — almost four times as expensive as prison.
— John Gibbins / UNION-TRIBUNE

Andrew Hardy is one of about 800 child molesters and rapists housed at the state hospital in Coalinga, in the Central Valley. They were deemed too dangerous to release when their prison sentences ended. — John Gibbins / UNION-TRIBUNE

Andrew Hardy is one of about 800 child molesters and rapists housed at the state hospital in Coalinga, in the Central Valley. They were deemed too dangerous to release when their prison sentences ended.
— John Gibbins / UNION-TRIBUNE

Michael St. Martin, a child molester from San Diego, shares a four-person room at the hospital. He and most other sex offenders at Coalinga refuse treatment. — John Gibbins / UNION-TRIBUNE

John Albert Gardner III could have ended up here indefinitely after his first prison term. Instead, he went on to murder North County teenagers Amber Dubois and Chelsea King, and was sentenced Friday to life in prison without parole.

It’s one of the many paths not taken for Gardner that afflict his victims’ families and motivate policymakers eyeing reforms.

Legislators and state auditors already are examining practices that even the state’s Sex Offender Management Board admits are dysfunctional — costly, convoluted and too often unable to recognize and control the most lethal predators.

Gardner, 31, spent five years in state prison for molesting and beating a Rancho Bernardo girl in 2000, and like many violent offenders, he was evaluated before his release for possible mental-health commitment. According to multiple sources, evaluators disagreed about whether he posed a danger to the public; under the law, that split decision meant he was paroled instead of hospitalized.

Had Gardner been committed, he probably would have started at a different state hospital. But some criminals from his class of offenders have been transferred here. There’s certainly room for them. The facility has a capacity of 1,500 beds, and about 600 of them are unused.

The empty beds are among the things being examined in the wake of the murders Gardner committed. Although the passage of Jessica’s Law in 2006 brought a tenfold increase in the number of offenders referred for possible hospitalization, commitments have gone down, according to data analysis by The San Diego Union-Tribune.

Nancy Kincaid, assistant director of the Department of Mental Health, said that’s because most of the referrals don’t meet the stringent criteria for mental-health placement. Chris Johnson, a San Francisco attorney who has been critical of the system, said it’s being done largely to save money. A state audit examining the bottleneck was approved in early May.

“We have serious concerns that (the Department of Mental Health) is not fully executing its duty to protect the public from sex offenders,” said state Assemblymen Nathan Fletcher, R-San Diego, and Jim Nielsen, R-Gerber, who asked for the audit.

Coalinga opened in August 2005, the first state hospital built in California in 50 years. It cost $388 million. It sits next to Pleasant Valley State Prison, about four miles west of Interstate 5 amid farmlands, oil wells and not much else — which was the whole idea. Nobody wants sex offenders nearby, especially not those known officially as “sexually violent predators,” which most of these men are.